


Through Sea Green Eyes

by Amiyusesha



Series: HEA AU [2]
Category: Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, MHEA_Harlequin_2020, references to Natasha's tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:07:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22605199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiyusesha/pseuds/Amiyusesha
Summary: Natasha ruminates on her relationship with Alexi and ‘childhood’ with the red room while answering questions about working with and against Cap’s Kooky Quartet.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Past Natasha Romanov/Alexei Shostakov | Alexi Shostakov
Series: HEA AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1603465
Kudos: 14
Collections: MHEA Harlequin Hoopla Prompt Challenge 2020





	Through Sea Green Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the February 7th: Saved from a bad marriage SuperRomance Prompt (3k or longer, any rating). It presents Natasha's view of the previous story in this collection and her history before that. It may not stand alone.

The man across from me has blue eyes and a pleasant demeanor. It wasn’t even faked, he seemed to genuinely like people. I make him nervous. That means he is smarter than most. Most men who have sat across a table from me have been too dismissive of me to be nervous. I have a pretty face and a lovely figure, and for most men that means I am simply an object to hold their lusts. That makes them easy to manipulate of course. I will manage with this one anyway. We want the same things, I just need to give him enough rope to see the view.

“Tell me how you became associated with Alexi Shostakov.” He says. The man across from me, in his nice suit and his purple striped tie, probably grew up middle class. I watch the calm beat of the pulse point by his jaw, and guess that he has no idea what horrors wait for orphans ‘taken in’ by the Red Room. I’ll keep things gentle for him.

“When Alexi survived the process to become the Red Guardian his handlers offered him his choice of the girls being kept by the Red Room. He picked me.”

“You make it sound as if you had no choice in the matter.”

“I didn’t. But that didn’t matter. The handlers simply replaced my true memories from before he chose me with the meet cute he chose. I was a ballerina in that story, and he was my patron. He offered me the world on a silver platter when he offered me that ring on one knee and I was overcome with delight. In reality the first time I met him was when I showed up in my fancy dress for our wedding.” The delight was true, that it was for Alexi was not. I checked the playbills when the fake memories started to wear through. I wanted something of my memories to be true, beyond a concrete room holding a chair with straps and some unknown man’s voice hissing _all little girls want to be ballerinas._ What can I remember of the man I actually loved… eyes like winter sky’s and a kiss that tasted of tea with lemon. _We can escape from them_ , whispers the only memory I have in his voice. He was wrong of course… then. I wish I could remember his name. I try and remember how it felt on my lips. Sha. Ash. Sha.

“And now you remember the real story.” Says the man across from me, eyes calm. None of his memories have ever been tampered with. I need him to imagine what that might be like.

“It’s not that simple. I remember that that story was fake. A few years away from the chair has poked holes in that false narrative. The real memories peek through the holes, but not enough to be pieced together… I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter. If I had ever been in love with him he has hit me enough that I am not any more.”

“Tell me how the chair works.” He says.

“I’m not an engineer, I don’t know how it works. I know how it feels, if that helps you at all. You’re surrounded at first, a dozen men, holding you down until the straps are in place. They shove something in your mouth, so that when the seizures start you don’t bite down on anything important. Then they bring the top part down around your head. If you look up at that part it looks almost like two rings. The inner ring is the part that locks in around your head. Then the pain starts, and when you wake up the pain is a bad dream you don’t want to think about, and you’re a retiring ballerina excited about your upcoming wedding… or whatever else they want you to think you are.”

“Tell me how you became involved with Clint Barton.”

“Alexi started the fire at the hotel. It didn’t work, since Tony wasn’t actually in the hotel. Alexi couldn’t admit that he messed up, and is really paranoid. He decided that Clint and his friends were some sort of opposing mercenary team and assigned me to infiltrate them the way he usually assigned me to infiltration.”

“He assigned his wife to seduce an enemy operative?”

“It was one of his things. He liked to watch me flirt with targets and critique my technique. If I looked like I was enjoying myself he called me a whore, and if I didn’t look like I was enjoying myself he called me frigid. I’m not going to miss him or help him escape if that’s one of things you are supposed to find out here. One of my objectives in this defection is a divorce.”

“Why did you stay with him for so long?”

“At first I was trying to be a good wife. I’m not sure the Red Room considered what would happen if Alexi defected when they decided to make me so loyal to him. Once that loyalty started wearing thin I realized how awful my marriage was, but I needed an exit strategy. Alexi kills those who betray him, and that wasn’t a fate I wanted for myself. It’s really Clint’s fault that I’m trying to defect now. He was the motivation I needed to put those desires into action.” Lovely, loyal Clint. Kind and Straightforward. So different from Alexi that Alexi never even considered him a threat to our marriage. When he saw me with S.H.I.E.L.D. it never even occurred to him that Clint might be my reason. He probably still thinks I left him for Tony’s money.

“You mentioned that Alexi is paranoid. That isn’t mentioned in any of his psych profiles.”

“Of course it isn’t. He wasn’t paranoid then. I can’t imagine they would have tried a procedure that has paranoia as a side effect on someone who was already paranoid. He was chosen to be the Red Guardian because they thought he was mentally and emotionally stable enough for it.” He wasn’t of course. None of them ever are. Only the original Captain ever made it through that procedure intact… if one was to believe that the American propaganda was true.

“I was under the impression that the Red Room churns out operatives.”

“Female operatives. The Red Room churns out female operatives. They collect little orphan girls to cage, and train, and torment. The last clear memory I have of my class… I was one of twenty-eight. Whatever they did to us for our graduation left me as one of three as far as I can tell. There were a lot more of us originally, various classes combine as they shrink, but children’s lives are sold cheaply when they don’t have family to object when they die, and three adult operatives is a good turn out for a graduating class. As far as I am aware Alexi is the only Red Guardian to survive the process.” I tried to think of the faces of my sisters, but the only image I could conjure was Wanda. Had we sat around a table painting each other’s nails? Talking about dead artists? They blended with the ballerinas I supposedly knew, memories…so unstable. They twist and writhe together, then pull apart into new forms. I remember one girl, blond… Yelena. A fellow dancer who appeared on no playbills. Was she crafted by the Red Room or an actual fellow student? If I found her now would she remember dancing with me, or did they craft different memories for her?

“I understand that the program is based on Project Rebirth?”

“Everyone wants their own Captain America.” The Captain, the original, the one and only. Code Blue. I wondered idly if the serum they pumped into his veins was as blue as mine was red.

“Are their other side effects besides paranoia?”

I shrug absently before answering. “I only know the bits and pieces I observed and can remember. I can tell you where some of the locations I trained in are, and perhaps you could find more complete answers there, but they moved us around a lot, and it is unlikely you will find the Red Room in a place I remember.” They tormented us and taught us to hunt one another. We are all paranoid, yes, but is that a side effect of our serum or a product of our training? A feature or a bug? How does one even tell if they are paranoid when so many truly are out to get them?

“And the serum made you stronger.”

“What didn’t kill us made us stronger, and more paranoid.” I tell him. “It is hard for me to separate out how much of that is the serum, and how much has to do with being raised by people who cared only for our future kill counts.” We cared for each other though… I can remember Yelena crying on my shoulder, the scent of her hair… Only true memories have scents, only true memories have tastes. All the memories come with sensation though. I can remember the feel of dancing, pushing through the pain as my feet blistered and bled. Perhaps the Red Room made their captive girls dance so that they would have real memories to tie to the fake ones.

“Tell me about your enhancements.”

“Stronger, faster… not just reflexes, but faster… processing time?... My senses are enhanced, so I hear and see things unenhanced humans miss, even in adverse conditions. I can read easily in low light for example, when normal humans strain to separate words and letters. But that wouldn’t help me in a fight if I weren’t processing those things as fast as I perceive them. Some of it might be training, but… my sisters and I move from noticing a potential advantage to using it much more quickly than even our best trained opponents.”

“And you never trained with male students?”

“I think I may have once. I remember a male student, but I remember being a ballerina as well. I can tell that this is an area of particular interest for you, but I can be much more informative about Alexi’s dealings with IronMonger than I can about anything that happened before I moved far away from any location equipped by one of the Chairs.” Truth, truth. I only want to give you truth Mr. Agent Man. Ask me questions I can really answer.

“Describe the male student.”

“Dark hair, metal arm, grey eyes…late teens? I would have been about fifteen, maybe sixteen, if any of those memories are reliable, and I’d guess him at seventeen.” I really do wish I could remember his name. I try it on my lips again. Sha. Ash. Sha. Would I have known what love felt like without him? Would I have recognized the potential of it with Clint if I hadn’t felt it once before? He built the framework for my recognition that my marriage with Alexi was an empty sham… and Clint placed the final nails in that coffin. I owe him, whomever he was. I need a way to always remember that.

“And how long ago was that?”

“Ten years, give or take a fake lifetime.”

“Tell me about sabotaging Tony Stark’s audi.”

“We didn’t do that. It was only after that failed that IronMonger decided it was worth it to meet Alexi’s demands. Our first attack was the hotel fire.”

“How involved were you in the fire?”

“I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have let Alexi light the place on fire before we collected our assignment. I probably wouldn’t have let him light it after either. Fires are terrible at destroying evidence. I have no idea how he intended to get the device from the coroner if the fire had worked… as his paranoia has increased his capacity for planning seems to be decreasing. He has never before left me in a position where I could betray him to local authorities the way he did this time. It is as if he has forgotten that I am anything other than the ballerina I thought myself on our wedding day.”

“How involved were you with the kidnapping?”

“He called me after he snatched Tony and assigned me to keep watch from the roof. I was supposed to notify him immediately if I noticed any suspicious activity.”

“You didn’t notify him at all, he had no idea we were there when we arrived.”

“I decided that Clint and his friend were not suspicious activity.” I cheerfully left out the presences of Wanda and Pietro. Omission isn’t untruth and what S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t know about Clint’s friends wouldn’t hurt anyone. “And then I decided that Tony mattered more than Alexi or the IronMonger. Why would I have notified him of your arrival when I was the one who called you in?”

“How much do you know about what happened in Afganistan?”

“I know that ours was not the first kidnapping IronMonger commissioned, and I know that one of the delays in hiring us was IronMonger’s insistence on paying us exclusively in Black Market Starktech.” Alexi likes his black market tech as well as anyone, but IronMonger was trading in machines of war, not assassination.

“Was there a problem with the Starktech on offer?”

“Ronin is an assassin, not a Warlord… Alexi’s own words during one of the negotiations. Anyway, Alexi preferred to be paid in things that were easily liquefiable. With cash one can always get black market tech from A.I.M.” A.I.M. the Walmart of black market technology. “Alexi planned on passing all the black market tech he did get from this venture on to their research division for reproduction.” The man across from me winced at that, as well he should. A.I.M. might not be the most reliable when it comes to their original tech, but they are excellent at reproducing anything they can get their grubby yellow paws on.

“Was IronMonger aware of that?”

“I doubt it. Honoring the copyright on the tech he gave us was one of the stipulations he demanded, but I’m sure everyone he has dealt with so far has violated that agreement. What is there for him to do about it? Sue the Ten Rings for breach of contract?”

“Do you know who sabotaged the audi?”

“From the way the IronMonger talked about it, I imagine he did that himself. Plus, it would have required the same level of access to Tony’s life that arranging the kidnapping, or supplying Alexi with the location of Valentine required.” Someone wealthy, powerful and well connected is betraying Tony from as close as it is possible to stand to him. Let me get you the evidence you need to move him away from my new friend, hmm?

“If I let you walk out of this office what are your plans?”

“I already told you that I want a divorce.”

“Beyond That.”

“My long term goal is to shut down the Red Room. In the short term… I have a date with Clint scheduled for Valentine’s Day.”

“Do you have a plan for how you will live on your own?”

“I was hoping for a paycheck from S.H.I.E.L.D., but I have been planning my exit strategy from Alexi for a long time now. I will be fine, whomever I start working for.”

“Who is your second choice for employment?”

“At the moment? Tony Stark. He needs someone dedicated to his safety, at least as long as IronMonger is out there… though judging from his track record he might be better off with a full time caretaker.” Across from me my agent nodded thoughtfully. Apparently believing Tony needed babysitting was a common enough sentiment that he didn’t mind me knowing he agreed. I thought about what I’d heard about Tony’s escape from Afghanistan… a flying metal suit… Hopefully there hadn’t been any big pieces of that left for A.I.M.

“How do you feel about Moonlighting?”

“That depends entirely on who I am moonlighting with, and under whose orders I am moonlighting. I will pretend to be a double agent, but I won’t actually betray any of my friends. If you want me working for both you and Tony don’t expect me to betray Tony for you.”

“I’m willing to employ you as a consultant if you can get me a meeting with Tony Stark.”

“I’ll need some time to arrange that.” I don’t know how much truth you will get from Tony Mr. Agent Man. He is a man very familiar with lies. I will not promise you he won’t spend your entire meeting telling you about his tie collection, but I feel fairly sure I can get him to talk to you. He has too many enemies to stand without allies.

“You have a week.”

“How about we aim for the 17th? Neither Tony nor I are going to be willing to reschedule our Valentine’s Day dates.” And how amazing is it that Clint still wants to date me? I lied to him about everything, and he just shrugged it off. No one in my life has ever treated a lie as something meaningless, or even potentially necessary. Are all of my truths enough reparations for a week of lies? And yet… He offered me the 14th with only a single truth, and a promise of more. I need to talk to Wanda and Steve. They will know how to make our date perfect for him.

“Tony is already dating again? I thought he and Rumiko broke up?”

“He and Rumiko did break up. Did you really think that TONY STARK wouldn’t have new arm candy and an elaborately planned Valentine’s Date in the works? When he’s spent the whole build up to Valentine’s Day in a town infamous for its Valentine’s Day celebration?” Have you met Tony Agent Phil? I am not sure there is anyone in the world who is as performatively confidant or as deeply insecure as Tony Stark. I hope Steve is prepared to accept some sort of ridiculously over the top present. I should warn him to prep for that. He’s a smart kid, but I doubt he has any conception of just how weird his life is about to get.

“I see. I will set time aside on my calendar for the 17th.”

“Thank you sir. I look forward to working with you in the future.”

“I as well. What name would you like on your S.H.I.E.L.D. ID.? It seems you have several… Natalia? Natalie? Nikita?”

“Natasha. Natasha Alianovna Romanova. It’s as close to a real name as I have.”

“I see. Very well then. See you on the 17th.”

**Author's Note:**

> I loved the 'two people alone in a room talking at each other' thing! This was a lot of fun to write. Hopefully you enjoy reading it.


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